58th Street

Home: W. 58^th St., Cleveland Ohio.  Here in the heartland many pride themselves on being the pulse of the nation.  We Ohioans decide elections.  We watch football.  We farm, industrialize and innovate.  We are America.

   It is my personal view that Clevelanders, in particular, typify the group of Ohioans who particularly cling to the specific anatomical similarity derived from their location.  Columbusonians will probably be among the first to object to this claim.

Columbusonians are also a proud breed, which, in fact, is home to the state capitol, which means that it is true a lot of politicking gets done there.  & I realize a certain constituent of Michiganders may come to read this knowing little about Ohio outside of college football, completely ignorant to the vast cultural inequities a place like Columbus has compared to one like Cleveland.

Economically metaphorically, OSU in your city is like giving a personified metropolitan area a perpetual IV tap, the source of which is vital nutrients donated by close relatives until they are all but drained.  Also, there’s the Arnold Classic.

Southern Ohioans may also object to the notion that Cleveland, more than other Ohio cities performs the States’ vital pulmonary function.  & I cannot deny, there are many fine establishments and restaurants in Cincinnati.  It’s nice.  But I’ll put it like this, if you don’t care about the NBA, which, of course, currently includes any self-respecting Clevelander: Cleveland is a little more blue state and Cinci is a little more red state. 

Cleveland is colder though, and the grit is takes to keep the beat— the stiff-inhalation, jaw-clenched American—that one came from Cleveland.  Then he/she spit.

A weave on 58th Street.

If we continue to suspend belief, you will understand W. 58^th Street between Lorain & Detroit Avenues to be the very epicenter of the entire country’s mother-fucking life force.  I found it difficult to believe at first as well.  But I’ve done some sleuthing and here are the facts, listed as they can be viewed walking north from Lorain:

1.         Weaves on the street.  I have been following this phenomenon for more than a year now.  I can only conclude that there is some kind of vortex that sucks up lost weaves and redistributes them on 58^th. 

(As a particularly boggling side note:
my artist-friend Ben silkscreens
 t-shirts and he made this one, which is def one
 of my faves, is it weaves or squids? You decide.)

2.         The shady-ass prostitution and drug dealing that happens from time to time at 58^th & Lorain.  Now, I know, I know, sometimes it really is just people waiting for the bus but other times…some shady-ass shit goes down on 58^th I promise you.  Mean-looking muscular men will discourage pedestrians from walking down "occupied" courts/alleys.  Drivers shout dollar amounts to the ladies on the corner.  One time my brother and I noticed the same woman working the corner three times a few hours apart.  The first time she just looked like a your typical overweight, scantily-clad corner person.  But the second time she was crying, holding her crotch and the third time she had a black eye.  This may actually be an explanation of #1, now that I’m writing it all out.

3.         Simons Park: A small donated garden with a sign at the northeast Bridge corner. “No Pets.” It stays clean.  People respect the sign.  -See 58^th has a little bit of everything.  There are beautiful 100-year-old stone homes next to row houses.  Audis and rusted-out vans.  It’s kind of a cluster, but between Lorain and Detroit is a community-volunteered, beautification project.  You’d miss it if you didn’t know it was there.  It’s a botanical gesture that allows the gentrified hippies and the angsty, high-schoolers a similar pride, and though this isn’t a beach out in the wherever, it’s just fine.

Of course, it is also common to see people blowing or otherwise raking leaves and grass clippings directly into the street, which suggests a general ignorance (at least of composting) and simultaneous compulsory need to have the appearance of a clean lawn.  Truly American.

4.        Sometimes the teenage girl that lives across the street from me sits on her roof.  The police go over there from time to time.  She can sit on the roof for hours.  I tried talking to her once.  Well, she talked to me.

“Can you call the police?”

“What’s going on?” I said.

“Please, just call the police.”

“Well, tell me what’s going on and I’ll decide whether to call the police.” I said.

An adult came to the window and insisted that everything was OK and that the police had already been there, which I later confirmed.

When you look over the rooftops to the east, you can see the downtown skyline.  It is just distant enough to be an ever-present reminder that we are here together in a series of different communities: the home; the block; the neighborhood; the city; the region; and so on…58 blocks out is perspective from but connected to the whole.

5.       The tasteful, hipstery bars at the Detroit-end of 58^th.  I mean, the Happy Dog: live music, trivia and hot dogs. Spice: well-done, American fusion with local ingredients.  Latitude 41 is ok.  –Wait. What? You’re not a hipster? You’re reading a blog.  You don’t like hot dogs?  Maybe you’re not American? Yes, they have vegan – Or would you rather go some place a little quieter, lil’ I’unno’ what…don worry, drink, I live right down the street…

6.         The Parkview: The local bar.  Good food, a brunch, live music and a view of the lake if you step outside.  Of course, there’s also a view of an all-but abandoned factory and a highway, but it really adds to the Cleveland-ness.  The PV sits on a bit of a hill and watching the cars pass, especially at night, it’s the best place to lay future plans of sledding, city planning and lake access, for that matter, where to spend the rest of an evening or even the rest of your life.  The heart beats a little deeper on this kind of night.  A thinning of the blood accounts for a certain percentage of the sensation, but light, shadows, waves – they play a part.

That's a home grown zucchini
 posing with the doggies.

Tact is the gateway through which 58^th Street is guiding the rest of us.  The readiness and acceptance required to navigate from Lorain to Detroit; see the lake, and see a better future is why people will wave and chat with each other; sit on the porch; hang out on the stoop.  Sure, a radio or two gets jacked, but when we speak to each other it’s with candor, a look in the eye, and a little hint that I have 5 big dogs that are kinda hard to control.

Nothing to see here

Drunken posting of not finished blog posts. Awesomeness.

Man's best friend, or something like that

Five years. That's what the breeder told my wife and I 4 years and 11 months ago when discussing how long it would take for our newest family member, Lola, to settle down. Now, "breeder" is a relative term here. It's more like "lady who had a lot of dogs without papers and was looking to dump them for $150 apiece before she moved out of the state." So trusting her on any account might have been my own fault. Also, I just realized that, like me, my dog is a WOP.

So here's Lola, now less than a month from her fifth birthday, still a friggin' lunatic.

Purchasing or adopting a Jack Russell Terrier is something people should not take lightly. Just like the warnings of "dogs are a lot of work" aren't sufficiently understood by non-dog owners, "Jacks are crazy assholes" isn't sufficiently understood by non-Jack owners. In the first two months of living in our home, Lola ate three pairs of underwear, a credit card, $40 in cash and a $300 retainer. Being ridiculously cute puppies is very clearly a survival adaptation these dogs have developed over time.

In the time since, she's devoured multiple rolls of toilet paper, many more pairs of underwear, candles and carpet among other things. Perhaps her favorite activity, however, is purse-digging when we have visitors. Her favorite target while digging is a pack of cigarettes, meaning she's either a very avid proponent of anti-smoking campaigns or has a nicotine habit. With her nerves, I'd bank on No. 2.

Hair and string also always seem to get into her system, which makes for the occasional difficult bowel movement. By difficult I mean difficult for her to finish without my help. I gag when I pick up her shit on a walk, so pulling fresh shit from her ass is not exactly a chore I enjoy.

This brings us to this past Thursday, when Lola had one of these difficult bowel movements.

It was 6 a.m., not an unusual time for her to wake up, go to the bathroom and eat. Normally, she takes a piss, comes inside to eat, lays back down for an hour or two, then goes back outside to take her morning shit (that is, unless she determines while pissing that it's too cold outside. If this happens, she eats then immediately finds a corner in the house to shit in while her owners are still sleeping. Have I mentioned she's nearly 5 years old?).

The shit came first today, or partially came, anyway. At some point in the previous 24 hours, Lola had consumed some hair, likely my wife's which can be found in random places around the house as she's losing it thanks to stopping her pre-natal vitamin regiment. This left Lola with a dangler.

You know she has one by the way she walks away from the dump site. If she's successfully deposited her waste, she'll hop away from it, turn around to smell it, then kick grass in the opposite direction in a futile attempt to cover it. If she has a dangler, she crab walks away from the site, tries to push some more, then continues to crab walk while looking up at you with desperation in her eyes. Because I love her, I help her out, and while it's never something I'm happy about, having to do it in the dark at 6 a.m. on this day left me particularly angry.

I successfully quarantined Lola in the garage and grabbed a piece of toilet paper from the bathroom to help her finish her BM. While this is never a pleasant process for either of us, it is relatively quick. Today, however, Lola decided she wasn't going to let me help her out, baring her teeth and snapping at me as I reached down to remove this dangler. I tried again, same thing, but with a little louder growl.

"Fine, take care of it yourself," I screamed as I shut the door from the garage to the house. At my dog. Who had shit hanging from her asshole. At 6 a.m.

This, of course, led to her scratching violently at the door to come inside. After a few minutes, I opened it. Still squatting, still looking desperately at me. So I shut the door. More scratching.

"Well, you're going to have to let me get it."

More growling.

At this point, I had three options: 1. Leave my dog to spread her dangler across the garage and mat it into her fur while left to her own devices; 2. Let her in the house to do the same; 3. Put her in the shower and power wash my dog's asshole. None of these options were ideal, but No. 3 was the only one that didn't result in my wife filing for divorce.

So I scooped up Lola, shit still hanging on for dear life from her ass, and put her in the shower. It only took about three seconds of me aiming a warm stream of water at her backside for her to scramble her way out of the tub and bathroom. So I just went from dog with shit stuck to its ass in the garage to wet dog with shit stuck to its ass in the house. Fortunately, Lola isn't nearly as quick as a crab walker and I was able to corral her before she decided to wipe her ass on the carpet.

I was able to remove the dangler successfully on my second power-washing attempt, and by this time, I had to tend to my now awake 3-month old daughter. As I fed her, I thought about the words of the "breeder" and longed for Nov. 30, Lola's fifth birthday. I thought about how nice it would be to have a dog that didn't act like a crazy asshole and eat things that led to shit not fully exiting on a semi-weekly basis. I smiled at the possibility, then watched as Lola successfully grabbed the toilet paper off the roll and ran into the bedroom to eat it.

It was a cleansing moment for all of us, I guess.

In My Hood

Seamus O'Mulligan is the semi-retired painter who owns the duplex next door to mine.  Like me, Seamus lives in the top and rents out the bottom, which makes living just outside of downtown Cleveland super affordable and convenient.  Seamus, I tell people, unlike me, “STAYS drunk.”

            For the most part he drinks 211 Steel Reserve out of a large, plastic, Burger King cup with a straw on the rocks.  There are several details to substantiate this fact.

A.    Seamus drinks 211 Steel Reserve: I know this because the day my then-girlfriend/current domestic partner’s¹ dog, Calvin, bit Seamus in the hand, he said at high volume a number of things, repeating many of them:

    1.  That dog is gonna die.

   2.    Tape it tight.

   3.    Rite Aide

   4.    211 Steel Reserve² 

B.  Seamus drinks out of a large, plastic Burger King cup: some times, I find this cup on my porch.  As it turns out, Seamus is a pretty early riser.  For this I have no scientific explanation.  Hypothesis: In the summer, I imagine, it is because he has no air conditioning.  However, it has become routine that Seamus and/or others of his friends will have a rip-roaring barbecue and bonfire with music in full effect by 9am. My dogs hate this. 

     I can only imagine that on mornings when Seamus can't get anyone to cook out with him, he just walks around the block, chilling on stoops of random houses seeing what passes by.  It stands to good reason that if one is going to creep around the neighborhood and drink on other people's porch steps, one would at least want a Burger King cup to obfuscate the beer.  It's also easier to fill with ice.

C. Seamus drinks from a straw.  Well you see, Seamus has almost no teeth.  This is the part of the story where you have to quickly decide whether to start feeling sorry for poor, old, toothless, alcoholic Seamus or bask in the pure marvel of this guy's existence.  Trust me for a second.

     1.  First off, Seamus is getting false teeth right now, so quit yer mopin'.  In fact, yesterday we discussed what he would eat first after getting his "uppers." Smiling carefully, he said "I've been thinking about a corn-beef sandwich with thousand island, an' all that shit."  We reminisced about the time Calvin bit him and he insisted that he loved dogs, he used to have one.³  

    2. Seamus actually has another rental property.  He used to have a boat.  Now the boat is in one of his back yards, his buddies keep threatening to burn it.
        Seamus lives a life of certain intention.  He has told me candidly that he's living the dream.  He keeps his expenses low, has the two rentals, goes to church and wakes up almost every day eager to see how many beers he can finish before passing out.  Some times he mows my lawn.  He totally mows over parts of the garden, but I never asked him to do it.  

    3.  Seamus has not one but two super shady vans.  He named them "Black Betty" and 
"Sloppy Sue."  Reportedly he got Black Betty for $500.  You can hear him coming down the street.
      It's like Uncle Buck, except it's your ornery, alcoholic neighbor.

    4.  Seamus has an incredible mullet and his sideburn hairs are at least five inches long.
    5.  Seamus never wears underpants.

______________________________________________

¹Love's really crazy, ya know?  One day you're buying a house together, the next she's moving to New York City to make it on Broadway...OH GOD! WHY DO I KEEP DOING THIS TO MYSELF? I'M SUCH A GODDAMN IDIOT!!! But we really do love each other, right? And now we're just like two independent, free spirits drifting through space and maybe one day we'll meet up again... ...ok, now I'm just sick of hearing the sound of my voice in my head.

² Though I do feel that in this post-9/11, post-Osama's-Death, post-Kardashian world I can be the kind of badass that just posts on the Internet, "my dog bit my neighbor" and not feel the need to further explain a thing, but it's a damn good story and this is the best way to explain it.  So, what actually happened was that Seamus was drunkenly reaching over the fence to pet Calvin, a feisty, australian-shepherd/dingo mix who had been abused/neglected.  Despite Calvin's growling and barking, and my shouting, "Don't pet that dog," Seamus reaches over-- Calvin gives him one good bite about half an inch deep in the fleshy part of his right hand near the pinky knuckle-- I tape up Seamus's hand and buy almost $9 worth of Steel Reserve up at the Rite Aide, and Seamus and I become friends.  Turns out Seamus had been abused as a kid and sympathized with Calvin.

³ Seamus mentioned that he and his dog were best friends for six years.  And I believe he meant it.  Apparently a few years back, "when the Rite Aide was a Save-a-Lot," as Seamus put it, he left his house a few days after Thanksgiving and asked his "girlfriend" (now, Seamus has a variety of women over his place, usually it's really early in the morning. Sometimes he pulls one of his vans into the drive really late at night and it sounds full of women and classic rock.  Conventional wisdom suggests: prostitutes. I can also provide a first-hand account of Seamus struggling to multitask pulling up his pants--no underwear--and chase after one such woman while calling her a "ten-dollar whore") to look after the dog.  Trembling with rage and raw emotion, Seamus explained that he left the Thanksgiving-turkey carcass in the fridge and "the bitch fed it to the dog."  I'd be lying to say he didn't weep a little.

Thanks for the grapes, bitch

There is no greater invention on the face of the Earth than the self-checkout line. Not the wheel, not sliced bread, not porn. You know why porn isn't better? Because thanks to the self-checkout line, you can buy porn without anyone judging you.

So the other day when I went to Meijer and purchased deodorant, mouthwash and Pepto Bismol, I went straight to the self-checkout line to avoid the odd looks from a cashier that purchasing these items together could create.

This prospective cashier doesn't know me. He/she doesn't know that I was wearing deodorant at the time, that my teeth have been thoroughly brushed for years and that the Pepto was for ... well that's none of his/her damn business, really. This led me to thinking, with the help of a friend in a text message conversation, that the inventor of this modern marvel likely did it to save himself the embarrassment of buying condoms. Now, this swanky son of a bitch has a condom machine in his house.

Of course, a search for "who invented self checkouts" comes up with nothing but this Wikipedia article about self checkouts. In it, they list "disadvantages" to self-checkout machines, to which I say, "lolwut?" The only "disadvantage" they could come up with was the prospect of more shoplifting. This is, of course, ridiculous. One of the main reasons for using a self-checkout machine is to be able to do the scanning by yourself. It makes you feel like you're doing something extra to really deserve those groceries that you're buying for the exact same price.

Even if you thought about shoplifting something, you're more than likely going to scan it while wrapped up in the pure ecstasy that one feels when yielding this kind of purchasing power. "Where's the- Oh shit, I already scanned it!"

Yes, some clown tried to scan a flatscreen with the barcode of a bargain-bin DVD and was caught because it was ridiculous. The machines are smarter than that, and know the weight difference between the director's cut of "Double Team" and a 42-inch Panasonic plasma. If you're going to shoplift using a self checkout, you have to go with like items, such as switching a pear for an apple, or avocados for tomatoes. These are small things with fractional price differences. Plus, the retiree who lost his pension in 2008 and is now working the door at Meijer so he can pay for his 13 prescriptions can't tell the difference between a Roma tomato and a red delicious apple. And even if he could, he'd simply smile knowingly at you and tell you to have a nice day, because those dickheads aren't giving him full benefits.

Perhaps, though, I shouldn't disparage Wikipedia too much, as there is at least one disadvantage to self-checkout machines: Inconsiderate people. This is also the disadvantage to living on Earth, but self checkouts are a good way to get a peak into a person's soul.

There are three types of people who use the self-checkout:

1. Normal, considerate people

These people will wait patiently across the aisle for the next lane to open up. And when your lane does open up, they'll allow you time to bag up your remaining groceries before they decide to start scanning items.

2. Pushy, semi-assholes

These people will pull up right behind you, perhaps even touch your child's face, and make you feel like you can't breathe while scanning your items. This is almost certain to cause you to be flustered and hurry through your scanning, perhaps missing and getting the dreaded "unknown item on cart" flash and the looks from cashiers and patrons that come with it. These pushy, semi-assholes can also see what you're purchasing because they're hovering. Both of those things are the exact reason you opted for the self-checkout machine in the first place. These people are mostly harmless, however, and will allow you to finish your business before they start theirs.

3. Dicks

These folks have all the characteristics of No. 2, except the last one. That means that as you're bagging your groceries, they're not at all afraid to start not only scanning their items, but firing them down into your own. This, fortunately, has only happened to me once, and the woman's grapes may or may not have "accidentally" wound up in one of my bags.

Obviously there is a certain reciprocity involved here, in that someone can be an awful self-checkerouter and slow things down. Of course, if you follow No. 1, you can scan the situation, identify these self-checkout novices and avoid their lane at all costs.

So to recap, the rules of self-checkout machines: 1. Sit back and wait until a machine opens; 2. If you're going to steal, steal like items; 3. Don't be a dick; 4. Always buy something embarrassing, because lord knows that's what these things were invented for, so you might as well take advantage of it.

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